SEO – Anchor Text

Anchor text in a web page is a gateway to yet another page in the website. It reflects what you can expect from the page, which you are about the view. So, anchor text is an important entity in web design and search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO experts have come up with various ways to write the anchor text in a standard website. They feel that if you optimize the anchor text, you will be able to attract more customers and increase search engine ranking.

Anchor Text is important for both internal website structure and external linking.

Internally it is wise to use anchor text with your keywords when you link between pages in your website.

To use an Anchor Text Hyperlink view code example here:

Your anchor text

When you discuss a topic in the content of your web page and mention a keyword that is covered on its own page, you should use a hyper linked anchor text to that page. Anchor text is a factor that can increase your Search Engine Results for keywords and are assumed to be part of Google’s algorithm to determine search engine results.

A prime place to have anchor test is also in the footer section of your website where copyright information is placed.

Example:

2005 Copywrite- All rights reserved “Keyword” www.yoursitename.com

(Hyper Linking the word “keyword” to the url for the page where this Keyword prominent)

External Linking should also utilize the anchor text hyper linking method.

Your anchor text

From articles, to forum signatures, to reciprocal links or, link to us directions, all should include your Major Keyword as a descriptive anchor text hyper link.

It is smart to utilize several different keyword anchor text hyperlinks for various different backlinks. Make a list of all your major keyword phrases and create the anchor link code. Each time you link to a different site, attempt to place a different anchor text link on each site. If you have five major keyword Phrases, you should have multiple links for each of those anchor text hyperlinks.

Watch your search engine results and traffic increase when you utilize the power of anchor text hyper linking.

SEO – Keyword Density

keyword density is the ratio of the word that is being searched for, i.e. the keyword, against the total number of words appearing on a given web page. If your keyword occurs only once or twice in a page of 500 or more words, obviously it has a lower keyword density than a keyword that would occur six or seven times in a page of similar length.

The keyword density tool is useful for helping webmasters/SEO’s achieve their optimum keyword density for a set of key terms/keywords.

As far as search engines are concerned, if a particular keyword has a higher density on that particular web page, then the chances of that page obtaining a much better search engine ranking increases almost exponentially.

Keyword density is important since search engines use this information to categorize a site’s theme, and to determine which terms this site is relevant to — the perfect keyword density will help archive higher search engine positions. Keyword density needs to be balanced correctly (too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for ‘keyword-spamming’).

Keyword’s should be chosen with care and you should use those keywords as often as you can ,and still “read” well. The amount of times your keyword comes up in your copy compared to other words is called keyword density.

Depending on who you ask, what search engine you are dealing with, or the phase of the moon, you will get a different answer from every SEO expert on what the right density should be.

Don’t try and “trick” the search engines. You almost always loose out in the end. Real content, written for real content usually ends up outranking sites that try and cheat the search engines.

Decide right now to play by the rules and when your competition begins to get banned, you will be up and running.

Improving the keyword density on your website is one of the fastest and simplest ways to increase your site’s visibility in the search engine results pages.

The HTML tags describing an image that appears when the mouse is rolled over the image on a Web page. Helpful for people who view pages in text-only mode. Some search engines look for keywords in ALT tags.

If you use images in your Web pages, its good practice to include Alt text for every image that a visitor to your site will see. ALT tags filled with keywords can also be used to boost your keyword frequency and help you achieve better rankings.

ALT tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers. Even if your Website is content rich, the alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, the key terms, within the content.

The overall impact of using ALT tags, in terms of search engine optimization, is low. As they have become abused by webmasters who fill alt tags with streams of keywords, the major search engines have lowered the importance of ALT tags in their algorithms. However, ALT tags are a required element for standards-based HTML coding. Every image must have an ALT tag, and each ALT tag must be properly implemented.

It’s great news for SEO though, because as long as you don’t “stuff” your images full of keywords, it’s a great way to add targeted keywords to your pages content.

Spiders eat alt tags up because while they can’t “read” an image, they sure can read an alt tag.

A great example of an alt tag is if there was a picture of a brown dog with spots, you would have alt tags for it that said “brown dog with spots”.

ALT tags serve the following functions in seo and web design.

* Make sites accessible to the visually disabled.

*Describe images so that search engines and the disabled can see them.

*Allow keywords to be added to your pages with out cluttering them up.

*They should be used for every image on your site, within reason.

Some keywords should be bolded to point the search engines in the right direction.

When you are writing your web pages you will probably want to give importance to a certain word or two. Unlike header tags, using the option in your html code to make a word stand out doesn’t carry as much weight with the search engines. Don’t discount it though because it does matter.

Many WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) programs do this for you on the fly, but make sure you end up with clean website code.

Header tags are HTML tags that help outline a web page or draw attention to important information. Keywords located inside header tags can provide a rankings boost in the search engines. Keywords in header tags are much like the head lines on a news paper.

Using Header tags tells the search engine what words are important in the context of your page.

Consider

,

,

, etc.. to be the way that you highlight important keywords.

Different browsers interpret the Header tags in different ways. The format for them is always the same though:

Header tags and your rankings.

There are several different pre-set sizes for header text using tags. They range from H1, to H6. You should use them to highlight your chosen keywords, and try to avoid fluff words – remember, you are writing for people not machines, so if you need a pronoun — use it.

Using Header tag optimization will help you boost your website in search engines.

Your rankings will suffer with out the proper use of Header tags, so don’t leave them out of your planning stages of search engine optimization.

Authors should use the title element to identify the contents of a document. Since users often consult documents out of context, authors should provide context rich page titles. The title element should ideally be less than 64 characters in length. While there is no limit on the length of a title, developers should be aware that the title element may be truncated if too long.

Page titles or title elements, are one of the most important factors when developing a search engine friendly web page. The section of your web pages. We prefer and highly recommend that the page title come right after the opening tag of your web pages.

The secret to using page titles right is to keep them short and sweet. Don’t use filler text, and/or/how/when, etc… Keep it focused on your targeted keywords that you got from your keyword research.

Your keyword research should be a factor in your meta-tag writing and your page titles both.

Planning before starting to make your website can really help you identify an internal linking structure and linking method for your site that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Keyword research is about the most important part of your success. You can be great at implementing all the proper SEO techniques, but it will all be in futile if you target the wrong keywords.

Before you code a line, or write a single word down, you should begin doing your keyword research.

The first thing I want you to do is go to goodkeywords.com and download the keyword tool they have there. It will allow you to search a keyword and for that search keyword it will also tell you the number of times a keyword or keyword combination has been searched for over a time period.

Now you’re just starting out, and your chances of getting ranked highly for a generic keyword is very slim. Instead of trying to optimize “keyword”, try to optimize something a little narrower like, “Keyword Research”.

You really shouldn’t write for the engines. Write your content so it’s readable, fresh, and above all navigable.

If you write about your keywords, and use them in your content you will be just fine.

Remember, sites that are written for HUMANS, with SEO in mind will do better in the long run, than sites that cheat.

Your ultimate goal when you do research for keywords (both high paying keywords and keywords that get a lot of traffic), is to find a happy medium between the amount of traffic you can expect if you rank well and the amount of competition you will have. If you can’t rank well for your chosen keyword, try to rank well for a keyword combination.

In order to be successful in getting the high positions in the search engines you also need to know how much competition there is for a word. Keywords or keyword phrases that are very competitive need more than just a well optimized page to rank high in the search engines. Off-the-page factors like link popularity and anchor texts in the links that point at your web page are very important to consider when choosing keywords.

In conclusion keyword research is the first and most decisive step you will take when optimizing your web site. It will determine how successful you will be.

Your keyword research should be a factor in your meta-tag writing and your page titles.